Tag: e-commerce

If you’ve worked with a digital marketing or content firm before, they might have tried to upsell you by offering to write product descriptions for your e-commerce store. But why bother spending money on a bunch of content that many customers won’t even read carefully?

Why not use the descriptions from my supplier?

From a purely informational standpoint, your supplier’s product descriptions are probably perfectly adequate. However, besides generally being poorly written, these descriptions have a major flaw. Your supplier will make these descriptions available to all of their distributors, and many of those distributors will use them.

Joining a whole list of different websites who are posting this duplicate content can eventually get you in trouble with Google. Not only will your website be considered generally less important (since your content is readily available elsewhere already), but you might also get flagged as a spam site, which can seriously interfere with your ability to rank for important keywords in the search results.

Unique descriptions can also help to improve your rankings, but first and foremost they are an important way to protect yourself from negative attention.

Can’t I just write them myself?

Of course you can! Product descriptions aren’t really very tricky to write. You’re just packaging information about your product with a few relevant keywords into an easily digestible and readable format.

The problem isn’t that they’re so difficult to write, it’s that it takes a long time. If your store sells a fairly conservative 500 different products, you can expect to spend a good 100 focused working-hours just on writing, and that doesn’t include the time you’ll spend inputting, formatting, and uploading the descriptions to your site.

As a small business owner or marketing manager, it’s unlikely that you have the time to drop everything for 2-3 weeks to get it done. As a result, these kinds of projects tend to get placed on the back burner, and forgotten there for months or years. Unfortunately, operating with a half-finished looking e-commerce store for months or years can translate to a lot of lost revenue.

Looking for someone to create product descriptions or other written content for your business? Reach out today!